ABSTRACT
Many people see artists as inherently mentally unstable and overindulgent. Such stereotypes date to the ancient Greeks and were reinforced in Enlightenment Era views of aesthetics as “unreason.” Later nineteenth-century concerns over public health would lump artists together with eccentrics, the mentally ill, and others seen as undesirable. Today, these attitudes persist in views of artists as moody or strange. Not helping matters have been retrospective “psychiatric autopsies” of figures such as Lord Byron and Van Gogh by well-known mental health professionals Nancy Andreasen and Kay Redfield Jamison. While recent neuroscience confirms that certain brain activities sometimes are shared by artists and the mentally ill, researchers argue that the two are not connected directly. Others point out that artists in the throes of profound mental illness or drug addiction can’t produce much of anything at all. Informing this chapter are by writings by Anna Abraham, Teresa Amabile, Margaret A. Boden, Shelley Carson, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Sir Francis Galton, Havelock Ellis, Simon Kyaga, Jacques Lacan, Apara Ranjan, and Susan Sontag.
